A friend just phoned me. My laptop has stopped working, she said. Can you do anything to sort it for me?

She described the symptoms and it sounds like the h/disk is faulty.

"It's time for a new one", I said. Oh Nooooooo! All my I-Tunes music is on that computer!!!

"You should have bought the CD's", I said.

This is a true story and happened just 30 mins ago.

Now I know she should have backed up the h/disk somewhere else but normal folks don't do that and my friend is not a computer geek.

Let's assume that the h/disk in your BS5 has just done something similar. Is there automatic backup? What then??

Discuss!

A PC or a Mac? There ways of recovering the data. She should not touch it until she has a plan.

For all the music she bought over itunes. She can contact iTunes customer service and as a favour she will be allowed to redownload all she has bought before. Apple will generally allow you to do this, but just once in your life.

---

Regarding the Beosound 5. The music must be on your PC before it is sent to the Beomaster 5.

I do not know if there is a way to get it back from the Beomaster 5 drive if your PC crashes.

So... If the BM5 crashes, the music that is on your PC can be used as a backup, but not the other way round.

That means you should still backup you PC hard drive.

It depends partly on what the fault with the HD is. If it won't boot that doesn't mean that the whole HD has gone. You could try downloading one of the  Linux distributions that runs from CD to see if the Hd is still readable.

 

Simon

I did say, very early on before we got first sight of the BS/BM5, that I thought the BM5, as a stand alone audio/media server, should have used a raid 1 array HD system. As such your data is mirrored on an identical drive and so single hard drive failures can be tolerated. As has been mentioned storage is cheap and would go unnoticed in  £3500 system. Others ahve already spoken of using external hard drives and time whatsit on their Macs.

My point is that there is significant time invested on the harddrive (whether yours or someone elses if you paid to have your CD's ripped, time to download etc) as well as content. To sell a stand alone system (for this price, sorry for keep mentioning it) and then expect the user to take additional measures to ensure the security/integrity of their data, when they could have made it a real feature, is very poor - perhaps the styling & marketing boys are having too much of a say!

Graham is correct about the average joe, my mate had a failing harddrive replaced last week - he thought he had backed up all his important data. I spent a significant amount of time with him yesterday, before confirming he had indeed lost all of his old emails and address book (including business stuff). Now we all know who's fault that was and we can speculate that he may be more cautious in future but the point is these things happen to people all day every day. If you can prevent it then why not??

Shut down the computer immediately, take the hard drive out, stick it in a completely watertight bag, leave it in the fridge for a day or two, and it should work for a few hours, unless it's completely had it.

It's also possible that the corruption is just in the boot sector, in which case, the hard drive is still readable, but not bootable. Putting it an external enclosure and connecting it to a computer via USB or Firewire should make it readable. It'll need to be a 2.5" computer enclosure though.

The easiest option is just to back everything up periodically. I backed up my MacB last night, just in case anything should happen to it. Also, as you say, buy the damn CDs!

Have at least two complete back ups and also have 160Gb on my iPod which can be retrieved if necessary! Worth having a go with the disc that came with the laptop. My wife's old laptop did the same and I restarted it with the system CD and was able to repair the hard disc. One of the boot files had become corrupted.

Alex:

leave it in the fridge for a day or two

Do I need to put it in the microwave after that? 750Watts? ;-) 

When you have all finished making suggestions I will print them out and give them to the lady concerned.........together with a BS5/BM5 brochure.

I wonder what she will think?

Alex:

The easiest option is just to back everything up periodically. I backed up my MacB last night, just in case anything should happen to it. Also, as you say, buy the damn CDs!

Thats what I do, if only for my music and pictures. Anything else on the PC can be retrieved elsewhere. Also backup my laptop for work once a week.

 

Craig

And those with a Mac can use the wonderful time machine using their time capsule! Setup your backup in one click, once and for all, and forget about it until you've got to find that document that you have just deleted/lost/overwritten...

Just bough 25 sounds of itunes, well not exactly bought, but upgraded them to iTune +, just in case I had to transfer them on a new B&O product that could read AAC for example ;-)

iTunes detected I bought quite a lot of songs and suggested that I made a backup of purchased music. If I had clicked Yes, I would have asked me to insert a blank CD/DVD and voila! 

Craig:

Alex:

The easiest option is just to back everything up periodically. I backed up my MacB last night, just in case anything should happen to it. Also, as you say, buy the damn CDs!

Thats what I do, if only for my music and pictures. Anything else on the PC can be retrieved elsewhere. Also backup my laptop for work once a week.

 

Craig

To jbg's point, you may be able to do this but how does this fit in with the average B&O's expectations (you remember - those that liked the fact the one remore worked everything etc. - unless the remote sorts out the automatic BM5 backup as well)?

PhilLondon:

And those with a Mac can use the wonderful time machine using their time capsule! Setup your backup in one click, once and for all, and forget about it until you've got to find that document that you have just deleted/lost/overwritten...

Just bough 25 sounds of itunes, well not exactly bought, but upgraded them to iTune +, just in case I had to transfer them on a new B&O product that could read AAC for example ;-)

iTunes detected I bought quite a lot of songs and suggested that I made a backup of purchased music. If I had clicked Yes, I would have asked me to insert a blank CD/DVD and voila! 

I agree again! But to my (slightly) earlier point, being asked to slot in a blank CD/DVD (I would argue at all, but in any case into something other than your B&O kit) in case you need to go through some future restore/reinstall process - isn't a B&O experience. Everything is meant to be invisible and seamless - I'll repeat that because I think those are key words that describe the B&O philosophy, "invisible and seamless".!

I was more talking about the Apple experience here!

Ideally the BS5/BM5 would have a CD drive and you would be able to rip by pressing the Record button on your Beo4, like it works for every other Beo product.

The backup is another issue, if your house is on fire or get robbed, you might lose your back up as well. So there cannot be a good automated solution.

PhilLondon:

I was more talking about the Apple experience here!

Ideally the BS5/BM5 would have a CD drive and you would be able to rip by pressing the Record button on your Beo4, like it works for every other Beo product.

The backup is another issue, if your house is on fire or get robbed, you might lose your back up as well. So there cannot be a good automated solution.

Whereas I compared it to the B&O experience! As regards the backup issue, if your house isn't on fire or you don't get robbed, why should it be a real technical issue to recover your music archive if you have a hard disk failure?

@ Graham. She might have those songs on her ipod. If so, I would download one of those tools that can take extract the songs form an Ipod back into Itunes.

 

Cheers

JK 

Here in the US there is a small industry that services the HDD crash issue. These operations take your HDD and extract the HD and read it with a separate device and load a new HDD for about $200-300 (you supply the HDD). In my work where we produce about a Tb of data per day, we have crashes once in a while and get all the data back this way. Only once was the crash so severe that they were not able to extract the data. In that case the housing of the HDD caught fire, not typical of HDD crashes.

I would assume such services are available in Europe as well.

Affineur:

I would assume such services are available in Europe as well.

 

Yes there is,  I used such a service not too long ago when one of my firms laptops with all employment salary data was located. No backup, I know, I was stupid.

The extraction of the data from tis harddrive was about 1000 euro...  + new HD + the work being done installing the softwares again, the end bill was about 1500 euro.

Needless to say I now have an external HD running daily backups.

 

IMHO...

try this first:

Peter :

My wife's old laptop did the same and I restarted it with the system CD and was able to repair the hard disc. One of the boot files had become corrupted.

try this second:

wirralsimon:

It depends partly on what the fault with the HD is. If it won't boot that doesn't mean that the whole HD has gone. You could try downloading one of the  Linux distributions that runs from CD to see if the Hd is still readable.

the first is the simplest, least painful. may well be back in biz w/ little effort.

the second is an excellent option, but more work. you will need to burn a cd bootable iso of linux / start from the cd drive / have a external drive ready to connect to dump the salvaged files / have a new hard drive ready to install / reinstall os, etc... / and then pull the salvaged files from the external drive.

third would be to use alex's chill down, if it works: immediately dump to the external drive.

fourth would be to send it to a data recovery service.

fifth would be to buy a new lappy (apple!!!) and do the itunes "single time" redownload.

after any of these ways, always backup!

Perhaps I'm being a bit thick here, the coffee is still kicking in this Sunday....

Despite our wants, desires and expectations the BM-5 is not a stand-alone item.  An 'administrating' computer is required.  As we all know, Apple doesn't supply a method for ripping directly onto an iPod, the AppleTv requires such a computer, even though it can download directly, it cannot rip by itself.  Most of the 'digital' music pieces with which the general public is familiar require a PC of some sort on the LAN.  I know...SooLoos...Kaleidescape...etc....as discussed before those sell for 2-4 times the projected price of the BM-5/BS-5.  

The point is that, by it's very nature, the BM-5 uses the PC/Mac as the back-up, and vice-versa (to a lesser extent).  If you require additional security, then make a separate back-up of the PC through whatever means you like. 

I think that most B&O clients will accept that as a reasonable situation. 

 

RussR,

I agree and that is one of the reasons that I have Apple TV and now Time Capsule. Leading a digital life requires that back-up(s) be present. It is somewhat analogous to insurance on a house, not something you would go without. The automaticity of Time Capsule is nice and may be a good solution for many who do not want to remember to regularly back-up their discs. Between the two MacBook Pros (mine and my wife's), Apple TV, and Time Capsule I have four back-ups of the media,  two each of personal stuff, and one of everything (Time Capsule) which is automatic and entirely up-to-date. Perhaps a little overkill... but then again.....